Back in 2010, I was absorbed in to playing a game called 'Defense of the Ancient (DOTA)'. If I were to describe how much I was into it, I was a member of a group consisted of 5 people, who one the second place for the competition, which made me able to have an experience to play in the WCG 2010, which took place in Singapore, as one of the two teams representing my home country. One might think like 'it's just a game, you just play and you get the result, what's so hard about it?' Well, the fact is that competing with players of top tiers around the world and trying to win over them is not that easy. As a matter of fact, it's really hard, and I would like to describe it as 'making the plays into art.' Our team, although we did not have any sponsors like other famous teams, gathered and practiced the game plays for around 8~9 hours every day for around 9 months. Even the practicing was really intense, and since our mindsets were not too much different from the professional game players while we practiced, I would consider this as a work experience.
To explain a little bit more about DOTA, it is a 'multiplayer online battle arena mod' type of game, which simply means you choose a hero for yourself inside the game and destroy everything that is not your ally. By earning more resources through killing the enemies, one gets an advantage over the enemy team. Thus, making the gear difference through earning more gold is the most important task for the game. there are 5 players for each team, and the sub-objective to win the game is to cooperate and overwhelm the opponents with better tactics. Although individual performance helps, cooperation is the main focus of the game, just like a basketball game.The team with the better cooperation and tactics will win the game, and to perform such a thing, the 5 players are expected to experience games together as a team for a long time.
Team cooperation 101: follow the leader's order.
We ranked 3rd place in the tournament, and we earned $1000 as a result. It might not seem too efficient and cost-worthy if one looks at the prize amount, but the main point was to challenge ourselves in a competitive environment, which was a great experience that I would never get again in my life. So, as mentioned earlier, the main point of the game was to be familiar with how the teammates are going to act in a certain type of situation, making less errors which would minimize the loss for the team and win the game by gaining more gold and gear advantage from the gold. This sounds easy, but the team fight phase ends in about 8~12 seconds, and each player has to 'calculate' which skill should be used of the four skills he has in about 2 seconds. The decision of which skill is to be used should be based on the composition of the team's heroes, the location of where the team is fighting, and which enemy hero should be prioritized. So again, it requires a lot of teamwork and practice.
When we practice in a game, each of my team members were one of the finest players in my home country for DOTA. Individual skills were the highest tier, and everyone had the general idea of what to do in the game. However, each member had their own unique personal characteristics, and mediating the differences were especially hard for us during the practice. For example, people had their own thoughts for how to act in a certain type of situation, and sometimes ended up losing the team fight because of failing to complying with the other team members. Although our team had a leader, we struggled a lot because members thought they should do what they think is right for the situation. We kept on doing this for the first three months of our practice. Our team won a lot during the practice, but also lost a lot. It was really hard for us to tolerate the losses, even from the public games which we were not expected to lose.
We had to come up with a solution for this matter. Our team gathered up, and discussed this crucial problem that we had. Team members were quite direct about their opinion; they didn't think that the order coming from the leader was not the best decision for the situation. We agreed that it made sense, but thought had better ideas that could resolve the team fight phase much better. However, this difference of opinions induced dispersion of the coordination which was the most crucial thing, and resulting in losses that was not necessary, even if we won the team fight. The solution to the problem was rather simple. We decided to just follow the lead's order without any personal thought. This was not easy at all; the habit of analyzing the situation was a part of ourselves, and this took around another 4 months to get used to it. However, after we finally got used to it, our end-game statistics were significantly improved compared to the games when we were not following orders so directly. Thinking about it now, we wouldn't have achieved 3rd place in Asian WCG if we didn't actually make that decision to mindlessly follow the lead's order.
It was really hard for us to overcome our habits. Although every one of us had a seemingly better plan, we were not able to explain the details of the plan in 2~3 seconds while the team fight was going on. It would have been much more efficient that if we realized that following under a single order would enhance the cooperation for the team as a whole, which meant almost everything in the game. In the end, we did fix the problem and saw what could happen if we had better coordination. Even though we still saw better, more ideal solutions for each team fight, we learned to keep silent and get the most out of coordination under a single lead.
This is an interesting story and well told. But let me ask you a question. How was the leader chosen? Did the leader have any special talents that the rest of the team members did not possess?
ReplyDeleteThe other, obvious, question is this. Does the lack or coordination early on counts for conflict as it is discussed in B&D chapter 8? You seem to think so but you don't make a case for it. I would suggest it really was not unless there was some systematic way that the lack of cooperation manifest which persisted from one competition to the next. In other words, if there was no real fight about how the leader should make his decisions, this doesn't seem like conflict to me. If there was a fight about the criteria the leader used to come up with a decision, then that might be conflict.
I can't tell from your story which it was, but you didn't tell it in a way where there were systematic decisions made that certain members of the group disagreed with each time. (And if there were, why did they accept that person as the leader?)
Those elements of the story are missing.
Thank you for your reply, professor Arvan. It seems to me also that I have lacked out the relevant details that would make my conflict an actual 'conflict'.
ReplyDeleteThe team member was the person who actually gathered up the team. So, we were in a clan called 'pein', which had around 40+ members in the clan. The clan was the number one clan in my home country, and the members were all above 0.5% of the gaming population. The leader was the one who gathered people by opening up a competition to distinguish the players who could actually go out for the qualifiers in our home country, and furthermore, to the WCG finals. Talent-wise, the person who gathered us all was the best in individual performance; he was very analytic in game playing, and showed the best physical attributes (meaning micro controls inside the game) among the 5 players.
The conflict had real fights. While playing the game, blaming others is actually really common. Even though we were in a fenced community named 'team', we were no exception for blaming someone, since we were also human beings who had feelings. To describe a little bit more about the blaming, I guess it is done due to a complex variations of reasons combined together. But the main reason that it takes place would be the thought of individuals, 'I do not want to lose, and I cannot accept the fact that I lost.' One of the examples that I think like this is that when we won the game even if the lead made some mistakes, team members were not really that much into the mistake part. Although we did analyze the past games and tried to point out the mistakes so we had room to improve our teamwork, at least there was no blaming.
The blaming reaches its peak right after when we lose a game. This affects the team severely, making team members depressed which leads to inefficient moves in the game if prolonged.
The team leader had his criteria of making decisions. I should have at least mentioned that it was a complicated process to come up with a decision. Since the game has much variables, such as the positioning of each team member, deciding who to focus on team fights, and so on, it is not really easy to come up with a clear-cut explanation for readers to understand. However, the game has tactics, and people move accordingly to the tactics as the lead planned before the start of the game. This tactic is mostly made by the characteristics of each heroes, and the synergy made from specific combination of heroes. Although the lead had the best physicals (micro controls), the team members were also very experienced players in my home country, and they had pride and confidence over their skills and decisions too. This, in turn, made the members of the team disagree more and more to the team leader as time past, affecting our results in the practice games. Although it was 'only' a practice game, it was really important since it was not a game with the public users, but with skilled teams from other countries.
As I have mentioned above in the main text, we thought that this vicious cycle had to stop, since it was not only affecting our team's result, but also the atmosphere severely. We had several fights over whether we should change the leader to someone else in the team, but we came to a converging point that we did not trust the lead's decision entirely. Although the team members had better tactics that they thought in their mind (meaning that they 'thought' it was better), agreeing and obeying to the tactics and actually gathering our strength into one point made the team perform much better in the practice games, and in the WCG finals.